Millions of Americans welcomed the Ralph Nader 2000 electoral
campaign as a breath of fresh air in the stale atmosphere of
corporate-controlled parties and politicians. The more Nader lambasted the
corporations and their "Republicratic" party, the more popular he became,
attracting larger crowds than Gore and Bush. Many people who didn't vote for
Nader would have if they thought he could have won. The Nader campaign
demonstrated, to those of us who blame corporate power for the problems in our
society, that we are not alone.

But before deciding that an electoral strategy is a solution, we
need to identify what exactly is the problem.

People increasingly realize that our seemingly unconnected
problems—the stress and difficulty that working people face in trying to support
a family, the insecurity of people with serious health care needs, the
destructive education reforms faced by students and teachers, the pollution of
our water and air—are all symptoms of the same problem. The majority of people,
who want a more equal and cooperative and democratic world, are under attack by
corporate and government leaders who dominate our society. The problem is that
real democracy, in the sense of ordinary people shaping society by their values,
doesn't exist—not on the job, not in our government, not in our major
institutions.

Real democracy must mean that ordinary people exercise effective
power at every level of society to shape it with their shared values and shared
vision. It can’t be reduced to pulling a lever every four years. Winning real
democracy therefore can only be done by ordinary people, in every place of work
and neighborhood, acting directly and collectively to take possession of the
world from the elite who claim to own it. It means creating a new kind of
society from the ground up, one based on equality and commitment to each other.
It means people joining together to defeat all the efforts of the elite to
impose capitalist relations of competition and inequality.

For people to gain the confidence to take matters into their own
hands requires building a mass movement with exactly this goal—a revolutionary
movement. Such a movement can succeed only by becoming a vast democratic force
consciously determined to create a new society in its image. The movement must
grow so large and popular that it can deprive the corporate rulers of the armed
might of the state, by convincingly presenting itself, not the
corporate-controlled government, as the legitimate authority. This is the
solution to the problem of corporate power.

An electoral strategy actually undercuts this real solution.
Urging people to vote is the opposite of urging them to join a revolutionary
movement. The idea of voting is to elect other people to make changes for
us. But the kind of changes we need can only be made by us. An electoral
strategy keeps a movement passive, focused on what its candidates might do if
elected, when it should be focused on what ordinary people themselves can do
where they work and live. This is why the elite have historically used elections
to contain anti-corporate movements.

An electoral strategy also prevents a movement from expressing
the radical goals that most people want. Radical goals cannot be taken seriously
in the absence of widespread confidence that there is a realistic way of
achieving them. Only a mass revolutionary movement, in which ordinary people are
the active force, can make radical changes in society. By making people place
their hopes on some elected officials rather than on themselves, an electoral
strategy eliminates any realistic basis for radical goals, and forces movements
to trim and adapt their vision and message to what they believe is possible
within the limitations of the established structures of power.

Nader's goal, for example, has never been to do away with
corporate power but to regulate it so that it can operate in a more sustainable
fashion. As he said in a recent Harper's interview, "a free democracy is
a precondition for a free market." Nader is not opposed to capitalism but only
to its excesses.

We believe that most Americans want not just a reduction in
corporate power but a profoundly different kind of society based on different
values. The top priority for the anti-corporate movement should be to make
people see that they are not alone in this aspiration, so that they will have
the confidence to take over control of society from the ground up, without
waiting for politicians to do for them what politicians cannot and will not do.

Originally published in New Democracy Newsletter,
November-December 2000.